Officially a pedophile or not, man snared with metadata meets quick end in prison

Donald Post, in mug shots from his sex offender registry from the Texas Department of Public Safety

Donald Post Sr got 40 years in federal prison for sexually abusing a child. The former NASA contractor didn’t last two months on the cell block.

Post’s fall began in August 2013, when FBI agents assigned to a national child exploitation investigation went to the door of a modest League City home. They were armed with the GPS coordinates embedded in the metadata of a chilling photo they found posted online.

Cross referencing the metadata with info from Google maps, the agents suspected someone at the home had snapped photos of a very young girl lying on a white leather couch and being sexually abused by an adult.

They were just a bit off on the location.

At the house next door they soon found Post, a registered sex offender, who got deferred adjudication after successfully completing probation over a 2004 incident in which he was also charged with abusing a child.

Within a year of speaking with FBI agents for the first time, Post was convicted, sentenced to prison, and strangled in his cell in Pine Knot, Ky., apparently by another inmate. It is no secret that inmates have a special hatred for pedophiles.

This is a letter from the warden to the federal court that served as official notification that Donald Post was killed in prison.

Post was taken from the hospital to a University of Kentucky emergency room, where he died. His body has since been cremated and his ashes have been shipped back to Texas.

The house where he lived was recently sold.

A Bureau of Prisons spokesman in Washington said regulations forbid him from saying if the death is being investigated or not – as such matters are in the hands of the FBI.

An FBI spokeswoman said regulations forbid her from confirming or denying the existence of an investigation, and the warden’s office has declined to return phone calls.

A coroner ruled that Post was strangled in a homicide. There have been no arrests and it is unclear if anyone will ever be charged in Post’s death. Authorities who already have their resources stretched thin might not see the need to invest in prosecuting an inmate who is already serving a hefty prison sentence.

The federal penitentiary in Pine Knot, Ky, where Donald Post was strangled.

With Post’s death also likely comes the end of a legal challenge regarding whether agents should have had a search warrant to obtain information, such as when and where the photo was taken, from the so-called metadata stamped into digital photographs.

A decision could have established some case law to help prosecutors or perhaps to help defendants. The appeal has not yet been withdrawn, but that seems likely with Post’s death. His lawyer did not return repeated phone calls requesting an interview. The protection of metadata, and its use by the government, has been a hot topic.

U.S. District Judge Gregg Costa shot down Post’s lawyer’s attempt to have the metadata thrown out on the grounds he didn’t know he was sharing the metadata, as it was hidden in the photo.

Costa compared the logic to a person saying they can’t be charged now with crimes that were committed long ago, but only recently solved thanks to the rise of DNA use. The judge concludes in his 10-page ruling:

“Post shared an illicit image on what is today perhaps the most public medium imaginable – the internet- so that others could see it. For the reasons explained above, he did not have a privacy interest in the metadata embedded in that image, and the government did not engage in an unconstitutional search when it used the metadata to find him.”

When Post died his record may have been forever cleared as an appeal was pending. It is similar to former Enron Chairman Kenneth Lay, who died of a heart attack while awaiting sentencing. As a Houston Chronicle article from 2006 notes:

“In his decision, Lake cited a decision in the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals that makes death, before the appeals process has been exhausted, grounds for throwing out a conviction and dismissing an indictment.”